Godzilla, Kong, Gamera & Co.: The Kaiju Mega-Thread

[Christopher]

I think Godzilla was still shorter than the Empire State Building in “Destroy All Monsters.”

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That Tumblr post is inaccurate. According to Wikizilla, Shin Godzilla's final form is 118.5 m, and LegendaryGoji is 108.2 m in the 2014 movie, 119.8 m subsequently. Other Godzillas topping 100 m are Hanna-Barbera Godzilla (122 m*), the later Heisei and Final Wars Gojis (100 m), and Singular Point Goji at maximum size (100+ m), plus of course Godzilla Earth in the anime trilogy at an unwieldy 300 m.

*The theme song says H-B Godzilla is "thirty stories high," which works out to just over 4 meters/13.3 feet per story. This is higher than a typical story in residential buildings (8-10 ft), but it works for commercial buildings, whose stories tend to be 12-14 ft because of the need for lighting, HVAC systems, etc. between floors. For comparison, the Empire State Building is 102 stories, with the top floor's height being 373.1 m (1224 ft), working out to 3.67 m (12 ft) per story.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I managed to find a panel from Marvel comics 'Godzilla' series that shows Godzilla attacking the Empire State Building. He appears to be about half the Empire State Building's height; so, still about 600 feet tall.

 

[Christopher]

I managed to find a panel from Marvel comics 'Godzilla' series that shows Godzilla attacking the Empire State Building. He appears to be about half the Empire State Building's height; so, still about 600 feet tall.

I dunno, comparing that to the Tumblr image above, his head only seems to be around the 150m line, or about 500 feet. Although to be that close to the tower, he'd have to be standing on top of the wider base, which would subtract about 73 feet from his height. So he'd be around 430 feet/130 meters, give or take.

 

[JD]

To be fair, Godzilla's look changed a lot in the movies, as well. Also, reference material wasn't hugely available back then. There were movie stills and promotional pictures printed in Famous Monsters of Filmland, but those were from different movies, so Trimpe probably didn't have access to images of the same Godzilla suit from all necessary angles.

This surprises me, you'd think since they were licensed by Toho, they would have been able to get reference material directly from them.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

This surprises me, you'd think since they were licensed by Toho, they would have been able to get reference material directly from them.

You would be surprised by how many Godzilla reaction videos on YouTube get a "footage flagged by Toho" slapped on them and taken down.
Toho seems very proprietary over videos showing footage from their Godzilla movies.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

This surprises me, you'd think since they were licensed by Toho, they would have been able to get reference material directly from them.

Comic book licences weren't a big deal to film and TV studios back then. It was simply another revenue stream, and not a particularly big one, and since "only kids read them, and they're all trash anyway", the studios usually didn't make a lot of effort to support the comics creators.

An example, which might be removed by more than ten years yet still gets the point across, the 1960s Star Trek comics from Gold Key were written without the Series Bible and with the artist being located in Italy where the TV show wasn't airing yet, with only a few black & white photographs for reference. This resulted in the art showing ship interiors and equipment that looked very different. They also depicted the Warp nacelles as some kind of rocket engine with flaming exhaust trails coming out the end:

Spoiler: Gold Key Star Trek pages

 

[JD]

Yeah, I'm aware of Gold Key and always wondered how it ended up so far off from the show. I guess I'm just too used to the modern era, where they put a lot more effort into the comics lining up with what we see onscreen.

 

[JD]

I just watched The Return of Godzilla for the first time today and I thought it was really good. Likeable human cast, with fairly interesting story, and some great Godzilla action. I've seen pretty much all the rest of the Heisei, but I was never able to see this one until today.

 

[thribs]

I just watched The Return of Godzilla for the first time today and I thought it was really good. Likeable human cast, with fairly interesting story, and some great Godzilla action. I've seen pretty much all the rest of the Heisei, but I was never able to see this one until today.

Which version did you see? Japanese or the American one?

 

[JD]

The Japanese version, it's on Max.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

In case anyone is interested, I saw the Criterion "Godzilla vs Biollante" Blue Ray on sale at Barnes and Noble this afternoon, and with the sale price and my membership discount, I saved 30% on the purchase. I plan on watching it tonight after work.

 

[thribs]

I’ve got it. It’s okay. It’s not the best remaster I’ve seen.
I always like how the film messes with you at the start. You select to watch it in its original Japanese but for the first 10 minutes they speak in English, making you think you selected the wrong language.

 

[Christopher]

I always like how the film messes with you at the start. You select to watch it in its original Japanese but for the first 10 minutes they speak in English, making you think you selected the wrong language.

I hated that, for precisely that reason.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

So, in watching Godzilla vs. Biollante did anyone catch that there was a statue of Godzilla in the office of the head of the Godzilla Defense Force, but it was based on his appearance from King Kong vs Godzilla as well as replica of the Oxygen Destroyer?
I can handwave the Oxygen Destroyer as someone may have found sketches that weren't destroyed/burned, but the statue of Godzilla as he appeared in King Kong vs Godzilla is a little harder to reconcile with this being a new continuity where Godzilla hadn't been seen in forty years since the events of the original Gorjira. If anything, the statue should have looked like the original Godzilla from 1954.​

 

[Christopher]

I can handwave the Oxygen Destroyer as someone may have found sketches that weren't destroyed/burned, but the statue of Godzilla as he appeared in King Kong vs Godzilla is a little harder to reconcile with this being a new continuity where Godzilla hadn't been seen in forty years since the events of the original Gorjira. If anything, the statue should have looked like the original Godzilla from 1954.

There may not have been a lot of surviving photos of Godzilla, and the statue may have been based on secondhand descriptions, or just artistic license.

Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack posited that the JSDF had suppressed reports of Godzilla's '54 attack because it made them look bad, so people in the early 2000s didn't remember what Godzilla looked like and initially mistook Baragon for Godzilla. (GMK also had an in-joke reference to the Roland Emmerich Godzilla, a line about a kaiju in New York City being mistakenly identified as Godzilla a few years earlier. That fits nicely into GMK's backstory, so I like to assume the two movies share a reality.)

 

[MikHutch]

So, in watching Godzilla vs. Biollante did anyone catch that there was a statue of Godzilla in the office of the head of the Godzilla Defense Force, but it was based on his appearance from King Kong vs Godzilla as well as replica of the Oxygen Destroyer?
I can handwave the Oxygen Destroyer as someone may have found sketches that weren't destroyed/burned, but the statue of Godzilla as he appeared in King Kong vs Godzilla is a little harder to reconcile with this being a new continuity where Godzilla hadn't been seen in forty years since the events of the original Gorjira. If anything, the statue should have looked like the original Godzilla from 1954.​

I assume he's simply a toy designed in universe with some artistic license that just happens to look like Goji from an alternate universe

 

[Samurai8472]

From Anime News Network: Marvel and TOHO International announced on Friday that they will release the five-part Godzilla Destroys the Marvel Universe series of comics starting with the first issue on July 16. Writer Gerry Duggan and artist Javier Garron are working on the series.

 

[Christopher]

Makes me wonder if we could see Marvel's Godzilla face Marvel's Ultraman.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

Makes me wonder if we could see Marvel's Godzilla face Marvel's Ultraman.

Marvel's Ultraman already had a crossover with the Avengers, so ...

 

[thribs]

Never been a fan of these “Destroy the Marvel Universe” concepts.